Your data knows how many people you have helped and how, and which supporters are worth a personal conversation. What would you ask it?
You get the result, not the homework.
One piece of work with a finish line: a written report that says what to do first.
Tell me what you’d ask, and I’ll say if it’s in there.
Two minutes. No sign-up to see the result.
Case notes, registers, supporter records, applications and emails, in whatever systems and spreadsheets they ended up in. It has been going in for years, and reading it back has never been anybody’s job. The data is there, but it’s all over the place, and your team has a day job.
You can hand it over in whatever state it is in. Nothing needs tidying first.
What your records say counts for more than how many there are. A hundred logged conversations with real notes can hold more than ten thousand bare rows.
Regular donations lapse without anyone announcing it, and your total only shows the effect months later.
The time goes too. Every question a funder or trustee asks gets answered by hand, or not at all.
What is one regular supporter worth to you a year?
Real conversations and projects in progress this year, described without names.
Every support worker writes up every session. The outcomes funders ask about are all in there, written as stories, so nobody can count them without going back through everything by hand.
A support charity, over ten years of case notesUseful to: Fundraising and trustees
The charity counts its events and participants, and what taking part changes for someone has never been drawn out of the registers and write-ups.
A participation charity, over a hundred eventsUseful to: Founder and fundraising
A decade of records holds the pattern: who stopped and what they had responded to before.
A medical charity, a decade of supporter recordsUseful to: Fundraising and finance
Every application is filed, and so is every outcome, but nobody has read them side by side. The work is to find the pattern in what funders rewarded, so the next bid starts from evidence rather than instinct.
A grant-funded charity, years of applicationsUseful to: Bid writers and the chief executive
Every campaign goes out to thousands, and whether it moved anything is answered by a colleague matching mailings to sales by hand. Joined properly, the records show which messages were followed by a purchase.
A membership charity, a decade of member recordsUseful to: Membership and finance
Each month a manager goes back through the case records to count by hand what the local authority asks for, when the counts are already in the notes.
A service charity, monthly returns counted by handUseful to: Service managers and operations
Two minutes. No sign-up to see the result.
Your records hold the difference you have made to the people you support, the supporters who have stopped giving, what the funders who said yes had in common, and what happened to people after they left you.
Most people arrive knowing what they hold but not what it can tell them. So the work starts with a focused investigation and builds from there. Each stage is priced and agreed before it starts, and each builds on what the previous one found.
We look at what you actually hold. Is the data there, is it usable, and does it say enough to answer the questions you are asking? Where the questions are not yet clear, we work them out with you. You receive a written, honest assessment, including a clear statement if the data cannot yet support the work, and a recommendation on what to do next.
We take a portion of your data and run the whole process on it, to confirm it can answer your questions before the full dataset is committed. You receive a working result on that portion, and a scoped, priced plan for the full report.
The complete dataset. Outdated records removed, gaps filled from trusted public sources, and the whole set searched against your questions. You receive the report, our findings, our take on what they mean and the actions for your team, presented in person. Two to four weeks from the day we have your data. The price scales with the depth and breadth of the data.
When your data has moved on or new questions come up, stage three can run again. The connections and clean-up built the first time are reused unless your systems have changed, so it costs less than the first report. If the picture hasn’t moved enough to justify it, I’ll say so.
Sometimes the requirement is simpler. You have a list and you need it improved. Gaps filled, the right contacts verified, and organisations that have moved, merged or closed identified, with the list returned ready to use.
These projects are quick, and a sound way to see how we work before committing to anything larger.
From £300 + VAT, plus any external data sources at cost, estimated up front.
What comes back goes to the people who act on it: your own team, and the fundraising and communications specialists you already work with on how to tell the story.
You can, if you already know your data is sound and which questions you want answered. If you’re not sure, the first stage settles it before you commit to a full run on data that turns out to be thin.
A dashboard shows what is happening, and somebody still has to find the time to look and work out what to do. One client asked me for a dashboard before anything else, and I said it would not give them the answers they need. What they needed was answers to their questions, and something to do about them, in writing.
Yes, and it’s the normal case. How private the data is gets agreed with you before anything is provided. Anything sensitive can be anonymised by script on my own systems if required, and written data terms are put in place for anything that needs them.
For example: One charity’s partner list turned out to name the wrong person at most of the organisations on it.
No. Working out the right questions from what you have recorded is part of the first stage.
For example: A first question can be as plain as: when someone left, did we close their case well?
If someone on your team has a few clear weeks, they can. This is for when nobody has, and you want two things at the end: a view from someone who does this all day, and the work of pulling your records together from every system they sit in, whatever shape they’re in. A mix of software, AI and tools built for your particular data does the first reading; every finding is checked against your records before it reaches you.
Send the question you keep coming back to, and roughly what you hold. You’ll hear whether your data can answer it, and what it would cost. Even a half-formed question is a good place to start.
Two minutes. No sign-up to see the result.
Or book twenty minutesTwenty minutes with Jackson. No slides.